Blog Archive

GIMP Paint Studio

GIMP Paint Studio is a package that comes with new tools and brushes, designed to improve the drawing capabilities of GIMP. We've covered GIMP Paint Studio a long time ago (wow, almost 2 years ago) and many things have changed since then - most importantly, GIMP Paint Studio now comes with an Ubuntu PPA so it's very easy to install it in Ubuntu.

GIMP Paint studio can be used for many tasks, including painting, erasing, blurring, airbrushing, inking and special effects.

For those who are not familiar with GIMP Paint Studio, here is a video introduction:

To add the PPA and install GIMP Paint Studio in Ubuntu (you obviously need to install GIMP first), use the following commands:

GIMP Painter

GIMP Painteradds some color blending and line smoothing features you can see in the video below (the video is quite old though):

Unfortunately, GIMP Painter is not a separate package but a whole patched GIMP. If you're using GIMP from the official Ubuntu repositories (Lucid, Maverick or Natty), the installation is very easy - just copy/paste the following commands in a terminal:

If you're using a newer GIMP version such as the latest stable version (available in the WebUpd8 PPA for example) - 2.6.11, you won't be able to use the above PPA because it has the same GIMP version as the official Ubuntu repositories (2.6.10 for Maverick). You can however install it, either by purging the PPA, downgrading GIMP or the easiest way: manually download the GIMP packages and install them using a terminal.

To install the above packages, download them all in some folder, let's say the "gimp" folder in your home directory and then use the following commands to install it:

cd ~/gimp

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Now GIMP with the GIMP Painter patch should be installed. Make sure you don't upgrade GIMP (as well as gimp-data and libgimp2.0 or else you'll lose the GIMP Painter patch!

Important: this will only work if you're using GIMP 2.6.11 and it won't work if you use GIMP 2.7.x (if you're using 2.7.x, the only way to install GIMP with the Painter patch is to purge the PPA from where you've installed GIMP 2.7.x!).